Not the language of flurry and ease. Not the song of the defrocked vigilante. Not the hemmed and attenuated.

An Introduction to Tonight’s Performance

A chattering in the eaves. A forceful muttering.Words carefully chosen, then smeared with beargrease.Not the language of flurry and ease. Not the songof the defrocked vigilante. Not the hemmed and attenuated.The truculent minnesinger. But the harried flightof the marauding crow. Missile sprung from the desert.Catapulted vixen. Acrid linguist. Cartwheeling Taoist.It’s rumored they could fly, watch you eating your rice—your ineffectual chopsticking and long-grained beard—hover above you, disembodied, then return before dawn.That they were not given to gossip was a godsend. But what about this sputtering saxophone? How to explain thatto the moderate drinkers gathered seatward this evening?Ladies and gentlemen, the modern attention requiresdisjunctiveness, ballistics, contortions. Requiresthat we drive this tractor-trailer filled with tortured geesethrough the Holland Tunnels of your ears. Forgive us,we can neither fly nor cartwheel effectively. Thereforewe have chosen the screams of wounded animals as our theme.That there will be more wounded requiring more such compositions is a given. That ticket prices will reflect this trend.That you should use the exits positioned at the foot of the stageand not burst unannounced through the corrugated steel.The management would like to remind you that one hailsa taxi, one does not ambush, derail, or otherwise interfere withor impede such commuter-oriented vehicles. They are aprivilege and not a right. If the perpetrator does notcome forward, we will remain in our seats until we haveexhausted the abuses we have planned for the various instruments.That you might wish to avoid this. That if the severed handon the apron is any indication. That announcements from the stageshall be random and without merit. That our purchase on realityseems tenuous. Please welcome if you will. You may choosenot to welcome, of course, but the performance will occur regardless.Festival

Wank. Wank. Testing one two. The night, the organism. The rented trucks, the wired-up and jump-started, the microbuses. The highway clogged with what’s happenings, with bongs and where the hormones tick tick tick. So we drove the vee dub into the ditch, leaped the fence, and hit drives with putters from the miniature golf course. He’s house artist now at a local rock ‘n’ roll club. She had some skills, but the technology changes so fast. For a while, when the guitars filled the air with messages, when the giggling Viet Nam vet forgot he was driving and crunched Juicy Plantman’s U-Haul, a voice told a dark story. He was backing up. Someone rolled off the roof, landed on his feet. Everyone cheered. America, freedom. A war somewhere. When he came home from Nam he tried to kill his brother who turned him on to acid and now he was driving into trees and trucks. Happy, he said, happy happy in this unexpected America.

Moving Freely About the Cabin

Unbuckled now. Seatback and tray tablein a less-than-upright position. Who will sayI am not the happy genius etc., riding thermals between Des Moines and Dubuquelike an afternoon vulture. The womanwith the infant at her breast, the manwith his Wall Street Journal—I containmultitudes, my breasts enormousand swollen with milk, my bank accountsunaccountably huge. I have kickedmy habits. I have vetted my long-terminvestments. Look at me, movingfreely about the cabin. Look at me, athwart the gunnels, my massivemissive tucked beneath my arm. My flightattendant proffers a beverage; my captain,O captain, hopes I am enjoying my flight. While the miserable shudder at bus stopsor risk gangland executions, whilethe complacent wade into honest back-wrenching jobs or cross out bank,movie store, grocery, I am engaged to reciteto the assembled hobbyists and hopefuls,to the tenured and tracked, to the wan coeds matriculating by the fire exit. Then I’m island-bound to a conference onThe Caribbean Sea as Metaphorduring which I will declaim my fatuous “St. Kitts Ode,” committedto secure the invitation, but which alsodemonstrates my unequalled graspof the semi colon—“not since Wordsworth”the critics intone—and my keen eye for particulars: cabanas blooming palein paler light, bikinis like hammocksfor the sleepy breasts. Six miles up,I perambulate among the REM-sleepersand cellophane-crinklers, among the lap-toppedand newly-pensioned. Tomorrow, I shall betheir spokesman, their voice, celebratingmyself, assuming what they assume,barbarically yawping in this languagethat mostly makes them nod and drowse.

Dead Squirrel

after Fred Frith

Possibly amidst the smashing glass. There amongst the tambourine marchers.Possibly before the door slams. Before the drummer stumbles. Beforethe scatteration of cymbal and tom, the crash and rattle of toppling snare. Possibly before the pharmacist staples the bag to the bag to the label to the receipt. Possibly there, among the ordinary gleamings in the silverware drawer, the wine glass coaxed into song. Possibly before the ambulances arrive, before the lumberyard truck starts backing and the geese lay their necks along the grassand emit the hissing blat we learned to call honking. Possibly before someoneclimbs tableside and attempts a ragged Mr. Bojangles imitation. Possiblybefore the dinner music. Before epistemology. Before the arrival of the latesttropical depression. Before Romanticism. Primitivism. Possibly before the fight song, the drinking song, the mystical ravings. Back there, in the dawn of time immemorial or something rather like it. Before the baying hounds. Before the cartographers mapped even the darkest caverns of our collective psyche.Before blenders. Crock pots. Before the lap dancer tossed the man’s drink in his face. Beforelap dancers. Before drinks. Even before faces.Somewhere during the cacophonous ceremony we were beginning to commenceto initiate, quite possibly the hysterical combatants were shouting over and over for no reason: Dead squirrel!Whether celebration or lament we cannot know, but the chant was, reports indicate, accompanied by muchhigh-stepping and forceful vomiting, by smashing glass, door slams, and stumbling drummers: Dead Squirrel!

Letter to M.

Those troglodytes you ravished in the Tuillerie were never among my favorites. I had hoped you would avenge yourselfwith the pallid stockbroker who crimped my Pinto. Suchcallousness notwithstanding, I long stillfor the incandescence of your linguistic events. As for my nights, I spend them tooling along the plangent Avenida de Shitkickers here in El Paso, where the jackrabbits’ incessant leaping and twitching reminds me of theby-now-famous “interpretive dance” you performed at Tommy’s Show Club. Though what you were interpreting and for whom remains obscure, I don’t begrudge you the peso-filled waistband or the festival of macho posturing that ensued. I do, however,wish that you’d assigned me a more suitable role.While appearing as a Minister of God satisfied somedeep craving for a more virtuous existence, it placed mein a somewhat compromised position vis a vis those cretinswho pursued you to the jukebox and then alternatelycackled and swooned outside your dressing room door.You will recall you thought they were “sweet”until they hurled a dwarf over the partition. Might I suggest that you also misjudged me? You questionedmy intentions. Fair enough. By now, it should be clearthat your breasts were part of the attraction, as wereyour characteristic, if somewhat obtuse, syntactical procedures.Frankly, I never minded being called “Ralphie,” and yourrefusal to recognize me on the street caused only a tremorof chagrin. If you will meet me outside the Three Star Desert Motel, I will return your pet nematodes, and perhapswe can share a Coruscating Camisole in the lobby bar.Remember how we used to set them aflame with your “Bugling Elk” lighter? I shall never forgetthe first time you raised your face from the fuming chalice—your singed eyebrows, your necklace of fire. If you will wearyour velvet jodhpurs, I will wear my loin cloth and fashion my hair into the Evil Knievel upsweep, whose meaning remains obscure, rooted as you always said, in our age’s “profound cultural myopia.”